


Serendipity

by leiascully



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-11-18
Updated: 2005-11-18
Packaged: 2017-10-03 07:20:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leiascully/pseuds/leiascully
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He realized he couldn't remember when she'd stopped smiling, or when she'd started again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Serendipity

**Author's Note:**

> Timeline: post-"The Goldberg Variations"  
> A/N: It took watching S7 for me to remember that Scully does smile.  
> Disclaimer: _The X-Files_ and all related characters are the property of Chris Carter, 1013 Productions, and Fox Studios. No profit is made from this and no infringement is intended.

He saw her smile in Chicago and it startled him. Four separate occasions and he was floored each time. She smiled at the little boy, she smiled at Henry's machine, she smiled at the gas station attendant with his lotto ticket, and she even smiled at one of his very own jokes. Astounding. It had seemed as if she would always look at the world with that guarded level stare that made his insides ache, the one he'd gotten for his trick with the elevator in the sidewalk. Maybe that one was a Mulder special.

He realized he couldn't remember when she'd stopped smiling, or when she'd started again, but she seemed comfortable with it, like the smile wasn't something she had to work up to. Maybe he just hadn't noticed the drought had broken, though he'd noticed the paucity of the desert years when he never saw her teeth. She'd smiled and laughed in the early days of their partnership, he thought. At him, maybe; he couldn't remember. The photographic memory that had carried him to the top of every class he'd ever taken was shaky since. Since the surgery he didn't recollect, since waking up to Scully's anxious face with a bandage on his head in a high-security facility neither of them were cleared for. He didn't like those parts, so in his head it was always "since" now, just that marker without the clauses, a meaningless metonomy to contain the horror of the violation of his brain.

But Scully smiled these days, and it was a mystery more profoundly thrilling than any X-File. The last grin he could remember was the night he'd taught her to play baseball. That had been a night to preserve - her warm backside tucked against the curve his body made around her had been a tantalizing experience, though it hadn't led as far as he'd briefly imagined. Afterwards, in the parking lot, she'd lounged against her car in that way she had of doing things when she remembered she was a woman. Maybe she was forgetting she was a consummate professional instead - he hadn't determined which it was, but knew he lived for those moments. Her hair had fallen across her face, but it couldn't conceal the brilliance of her smile. She was thanking him and all he could think was, old son, if you've ever loved a woman, it's this one. This is a Moment: to tell her, to kiss her, to touch her face. But as he'd gathered the courage and leaned forward, she'd tossed her head to discipline her hair, and he had to settle for whispering in her ear.

"It's good to see you happy."

She had looked up at him, all honest blue eyes and sweetly curved lips, studying him. "Thank you, Mulder." The weight of the words staggered him. She had a way of putting years of their history into simple words, metric tons of emotion in a couple of syllables. With little phrases like that, she wrung the tears and terrors from awful nights and brought peace to the starry dark.

He teetered towards her, just far enough to seem like his usual invasion of her personal space.

"We should do this more often." I love you, he had meant to say.

"We should," she said, still alight. She reached for his hand and squeezed it warmly. "Good night, Mulder." And he let her get into her car and drive away. For himself, it took several hours of lying on the hood of his car gazing at the stars to recover from the implications of his flirting and her tender regard. Even now, walking the streets of Chicago with her, he got aroused thinking of the way their bodies had fitted together and the way she had responded to his banter and not entirely ignored his attraction.

And here in Chicago she smiled and he didn't know what it meant. She didn't want to be here, she'd said. She had come into his hotel room last night and recited a list of reasons their presence was unnecessary while he was trapped in the shower. When he emerged, hips swathed strategically in a towel, and found her sitting primly on his bed, she'd eyed him and continued with her litany on how luck was not a crime. He stayed in the towel, trying to goad her out of the room, but she was implacable, wearing her doctor's face as the water dripped from his hair to his shoulders.

"People don't get lucky in plane crashes anyway," she'd finished dismissively.

"I don't know," he said, unable to resist and feeling vulnerable with so much skin bare. "Last moments on earth? Tell me you wouldn't want to get lucky."

She'd rolled her eyes but moved over to make room on the bed for him. He thought about wrestling her for the remote but it seemed unwise in his precarious terry-cloth situation. They ended up watching _The Daily Show_ and studiously ignoring the intimate atmosphere. He nearly kissed her again during the credits, had drifted nearer when she suddenly said, "But I only fly with you these days, Mulder."

There was nothing to say to that. He had taken the remote then, flipping through the hotel's limited channels to settle on weather radar. He stared blankly at it, aware of her body inches away.

"Sometimes there's no good way to amend a statement," she murmured after a moment, and put her shoulder briefly against his. She had taken off her jacket. He could feel the droplets of water still on his skin soak the thin fabric of her shirt. "I didn't mean I wouldn't want to spend my last moments with you, Mulder, wherever or however they occurred. It seems likely, doesn't it?" With that, she had padded off to bed. By morning, Mulder was a weary expert on the weather of Cook County.

Now at the end of the day here they were, side by side on the plane as usual. He'd given her the window seat as always; she didn't sleep on planes as well as he did, which was ironic because she had slept through a hundred revelations and he stayed up for days for no reason. They were marooned on the runway waiting to taxi and takeoff. He knew this was the part she hated, the stasis, but he'd spent years perfecting the art of driving her to distraction.

"That turned out well," he said cheerfully. "The FBI's money well spent."

She turned her face to him. She was further than a breath but closer than a sigh; the corners of her eyes relaxed as she parried his opening. "We didn't do much, Mulder."

He leaned closer, near enough to count her eyelashes. "Cause and effect, Scully. If we weren't there to be cogs in Henry's big crazy Rube Goldberg machine of a life, who knows how his luck would have gone?"

"Mulder," she was warming to the discussion, focused on it, "you can say that about anybody's life. What if we didn't meet this person or that person? What if I hadn't been assigned to you, or if you had stayed in psychology? It's an infinite universe. You can't play that game."

"Ah, Scully, you do keep me honest," he said.

"Somebody has to." She looked out the window. Mulder sensed he was wading into dangerous territory, having evoked their almost-kiss in his hallway.

"Cause and effect, though," he persevered. "You'll admit we played a part. The eye, the buzzer, your lottery suggestion."

"Granted we played a part, but if Henry Weems was really as lucky as you say he was, one can assume that things would have worked out on their own. Why wouldn't other cogs work as well as we did?" She looked at him again, just a hint of triumph in her eyes. "Not so neatly, perhaps, as simultaneously fulfilling his wishes and the FBI's, but his will, and his luck, seemed unstoppable." She'd beaten him at Mulderlogic. But she wasn't smiling anymore: her eyes were serious and sad again, and he thought of her quip in the hospital. 'Hell, I just beat him,' she'd said, as if she were a person whom serendipity had abandoned.

"Your luck isn't so bad," he said, and kissed her, almost by accident. She didn't draw away, which surprised him enough that he almost stopped kissing her. The response of her mouth to his wasn't tentative or wild but accustomed somehow, as if they'd done this a hundred times instead of once, but it didn't make things less thrilling. He felt the exploratory flicker of her tongue through her parted lips and answered it; he forgot to breathe and had to break away from her to inhale. Her eyes were dreamy. Under them, the plane rumbled as the brakes disengaged and they started down the runway.

"I didn't mean that I think I'm a lucky thing in your life, or that you're lucky to have me around, because I think I'm more of a bad luck charm," he rambled nervously.

"Mulder," she said sweetly, and put one perfect fingertip to his lips. "Shhh."

Then she touched her perfect lips to his again, just for a moment, and looked out the window. She was smiling.


End file.
